Post by humanbelly on Jun 28, 2012 20:20:29 GMT -5
I'm up to the 100th issue, in fact (vol 1).
I was faithful to this book as a regular reader until the end of 1979 (Freshman year of college)-- but then it was in the first round of "neither the time or money" cuts that had to be made at that point.
There was an astonishing amount of not-good that was passed on to us readers between those covers over the years, although there was a mighty nice string of solid, fun issues delivered by Bill Mantlo/Sal Buscema & Chris Claremont/John Byrne at the height of its run. I'm now (sadly) into the post-good era, which I've acquired absent-mindedly over the years.
What you do see in reading a title like this straight through are the egregious shifts (about-faces, even) in editorial policies and priorities. Letters columns early on took the creators and editors seriously to task about why the book wasn't good at all, and demanded change. And those changes happened, and the book became good-! A few years later, there's an obvious, openly admitted shift towards making continuity and quality a secondary priority to simply using Spidey's popularity as a gimmick to draw readers in so they can be exposed to new or secondary or tertiary characters that need the face-time or a sales boost. Stories went back to being formulaic hack-jobs w/ journeyman writers and artists-in-need who were being tossed a bone (which was a heartbreak all its own).
Don't know if anyone has any memories or opinions to toss out about the series--- but I may be the informed fellow w/ the ear ready to be bent about it, if you do, eh?
HB
I was faithful to this book as a regular reader until the end of 1979 (Freshman year of college)-- but then it was in the first round of "neither the time or money" cuts that had to be made at that point.
There was an astonishing amount of not-good that was passed on to us readers between those covers over the years, although there was a mighty nice string of solid, fun issues delivered by Bill Mantlo/Sal Buscema & Chris Claremont/John Byrne at the height of its run. I'm now (sadly) into the post-good era, which I've acquired absent-mindedly over the years.
What you do see in reading a title like this straight through are the egregious shifts (about-faces, even) in editorial policies and priorities. Letters columns early on took the creators and editors seriously to task about why the book wasn't good at all, and demanded change. And those changes happened, and the book became good-! A few years later, there's an obvious, openly admitted shift towards making continuity and quality a secondary priority to simply using Spidey's popularity as a gimmick to draw readers in so they can be exposed to new or secondary or tertiary characters that need the face-time or a sales boost. Stories went back to being formulaic hack-jobs w/ journeyman writers and artists-in-need who were being tossed a bone (which was a heartbreak all its own).
Don't know if anyone has any memories or opinions to toss out about the series--- but I may be the informed fellow w/ the ear ready to be bent about it, if you do, eh?
HB
